For over 30 years, the Medicines Missionary Center has been collecting and sending medicines, medical surgical aids and products for children free of charge to health workers and missionaries who work in hospitals and dispensaries in the countries of the South of the world and Eastern Europe.
The Center receives medicines and health care as gifts from pharmacies, doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and in recent years also from the Pharmaceutical Bank. The packages are prepared by healthcare personnel, according to the specific requests of the beneficiaries.
Protected and sealed with special material and accompanied by specific documentation, including diplomatic ones, the packages are shipped through the postal service, couriers and containers. Large quantities of drugs leave directly, through missionaries, doctors and volunteers leaving for the missions.
The Center also actively supports Caritas structures and family homes in our area. In over 30 years in business, thousands of tons of drugs, healthcare and medical equipment have been shipped to over 250 facilities around the world, reaching millions of people and saving thousands of lives.
Is chemotherapy bad for you?Depends. Chemotherapy is effective in killing cancer cells, but it can damage healthy cells, causing side effects that in most cases can be controlled and contained.Last updated: September 1, 2018Reading time: 7 minutesIn short
Chemotherapy can save lives because it uses drugs capable of destroying actively proliferating cells, such as cancer cells, thus blocking the progression and spread of the disease.Some cells in our body share a characteristic with cancer cells: the ability to grow very quickly.
For this reason, chemotherapy drugs, which act on the ability of cells to multiply, can also destroy some healthy cells that reproduce just as quickly. These include the cells of the blood, those of the hair follicles, the cells that line the mouth, stomach and intestines, and those of the reproductive organs.
Side effects of chemotherapy include hair loss, anemia, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, infections, bruising or small bleeding, and even cognitive problems (“chemo brain” ).
Normal tissues have the ability to remedy these adverse effects once therapy is finished, and therefore the likelihood of long-term side effects is relatively low.
Researchers continue to study and propose new drug combinations and new administration schemes to make chemotherapy more effective against cancer and less harmful to the rest of the body.
The word to the expertOncologist Francesco Perrone talks about the side effects of chemotherapy.What are the benefits of chemotherapy?To date, there are more than 100 anticancer chemotherapy drugs. The choice of drug depends on the type of tumor, how extensive it is at the time of diagnosis and the characteristics of the patient.
Chemotherapeutics, the use of which against cancer began in the 1950s, fight cancer in different ways: they eliminate cancer cells, slow down the growth of the disease, prevent its spread to other tissues (metastases), and relieve pain caused by the presence of the tumor mass.